Editing dashboards
What is the Dashboard Editor?
The Dashboard Editor in thingsHub allows to create dashboards based on data from connected IoT devices. Each Dashboard may contain multiple dashboard panels, which each ca be graph, table or other visualization of the data. The created dashboards an then be shown in the thingsHub’s user interface, as shown in Dashboards. The Dashboard Editor is a light-weight visualization tool for inspection, monitoring and for visualization of IoT data. It is meant to extend business intelligence and analytics systems, not to replace them.
How to build IoT Sensor Data Dashboards
Read the following page: Getting started with thingsHub to find out how to create a first dashboard.
Where to find more documentation on how to work with the visualizer?
The visualizer is based on Grafana. Grafana is a web application for visualising time series data. It has a high degree of flexibility in collecting, combining and transforming metrics. Graphite is a database application for receiving, storing, compacting and serving metrics. It has a very simple interface for submitting metrics. You can read more at the official Grafana documentation. Furthermore, the data can be accessed using the Influx Query Language (InfluxQL).
How long will my data be stored?
The visualizer uses different data retention policies (see the InfluxDB documentation) for different data. In the thingsHub the Visualizer serves two distinct purposes: on the hand, it acts as a built-in monitoring component for the thingsHub itself and the IoT data transmitted over it. The visualization data generated for this monitoring is always only stored for a limited period of time, e.g. 2 days, 7 days or 1 month. In addition to this, the thingsHub's Visualizer can act as a data sink, i.e. it can be used to store data for longer periods of time.
Data | Examples | Retention Policy | Defaults |
|---|---|---|---|
Data Tables | Backing store for all user-create Data Tables, i.e. can contain nearly anything that requires storing and time-based access. |
| unlimited |
Driver-decoded Device Data | IoT data transmitted by devices and decoded by drivers, e.g. battery voltages, temperature, pulse counts, ... |
| 7d |
Radio Reception Data | RSSI (received signal strength indicator), SNR (signal to noise ratio), gateway IDs, etc. |
| 7d |
Logs | Connector logs, .... |
| 7d |
The configuration of retention policies is part of the tenant configuration (and can consequently be configured differently per tenant). Configuration is only available for users of the Enterprise Edition. Users of the Professional Edition should ask your contact person at SmartMakers for support if they require a different retention policy.
How to manage user and access rights for the visualizer?
Manage or Invite users
We strongly suggest to not use Grafana’s user feature directly. Instead, use the thingsHub user management and provide the user with access to Grafana access via the available Visualizer Roles. For this, do the following steps:
Step 1. Create a new user in thingshub. All thingsHub users will be automatically synced into the user management of Grafana
Step 2. Set the "Visualizer Role" to
"Viewer" if the user should only be able to see dashboards
"Editor" if the user should be able to edit dashboards
A user can have any one of the roles Viewer and Editor in Grafana. The role Admin cannot be assigned for security reasons.
Remove user access to the Dashboard Editor
To remove a user’s access to the Dashboard Editor, simply delete the user in the thingsHub.